1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a recording/reproducing apparatus for recording/reproducing video data and other data such as digital audio data by use of the same recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
A technique for recording/reproducing video data and digital audio data by use of the same recording medium has been practically used in VTRs, video disk devices and the like. In the conventional recording/ reproducing apparatus, the video data channels and the digital audio data channels are completely separated from each other.
Therefore, even when the video data channel has a video memory of large capacity, the video memory is only used for processing video data recorded/reproduced via the video data channel, and thus the hardware is not effectively used.
The digital audio data channel is provided to simultaneously record/reproduce multi-channel audio data of four or more channels, but in some applications of the apparatus, two-channel audio data may be sufficiently used to serve a desired purpose. In this case, the remaining audio data channels are not effectively used.
As described above, in the prior art, the large-capacity video memory provided for the video data channel is not effectively used, and the digital audio data channel capable of simultaneously recording reproducing the multi-channel audio data has a problem that when the number of channels to be used is reduced, the remaining channels are not effectively used.